The true story behind the murder mystery gripping the world
IN AN AFFLUENT suburb of Sydney, a softly spoken 33-year-old mother of two suddenly vanishes without a trace. Her husband – a former rugby player with movie star looks – quickly moves a 16-year-old schoolgirl into their home, slipping his missing wife’s rings on to her fingers and making her the de facto mother to their little girls.
This might sound like the plot of a Gillian Flynn thriller, but it’s actually the true story gripping a global audience in podcast series The Teacher’s Pet. By Hedley Thomas, national chief correspondent of The Australian newspaper, it has now been downloaded 12 million times, but it’s much more than mere entertainment. It’s a forensic investigation into the probable murder of Lyn Dawson, and the new evidence it’s uncovering could finally bring to justice the man Thomas believes is her killer.
Thomas first wrote about the mystery of Lyn’s disappearance in 2001, when a coroner ruled that her husband, Chris Dawson, had murdered her. Despite another coroner reaching the same verdict two years later, the New South Wales DPP ruled there was insufficient evidence to charge him. ‘I’d always thought about the case over the years,’ says Thomas, whose father’s death last year prompted him to explore the idea of tackling something different from the print journalism he’d been doing for more than 30 years. ‘I needed something to energise me, so I decided to reinvestigate it for a podcast.’
Lyn, a nurse, had been with Dawson, a rugby league player who became a PE teacher, since high school. The couple had two daughters, Shanelle and Sherryn, on whom Lyn doted, but friends noticed bruises on her body. Just before Christmas 1981, Lyn discovered that Dawson and Joanne Curtis, one of his pupils and the family babysitter, were having a sexual relationship. Barely two weeks later, Lyn disappeared; her husband claiming she’d probably joined a religious cult. She was never seen again, although Dawson – who strongly denies killing her – claimed to have spotted her once in an episode of Antiques Roadshow in Padstow, Cornwall.
Thomas spent months speaking to those who knew Lyn and tracking down every piece of documentary evidence before the first episode of the podcast aired in June. ‘I’ve never experienced a reaction like it,’ says Thomas, who has been contacted by floods of people wanting to share what they know. ‘A lot of people wanted to talk for the first time and it became obvious that this story has been buried in them for decades. They heard other people speaking on the podcast and thought, “This finally has a chance to be solved.”’
The story that emerged centred on Lyn, but spiralled out to encompass widespread sexual abuse of pupils by teachers at schools in Sydney’s northern beaches, in which Dawson is accused of taking part. ‘ The podcast took on a life of its own when former pupils started speaking about what had happened,’ says Thomas. ‘It was a culture that contributed to Lyn’s murder. Robyn Wheeler [a former vice-captain of Cromer High School, where Dawson taught] said sex between teachers and students was rife. She summed it up beautifully when she said, “When teachers get away with this sort of behaviour, they think they can get away with anything.”’
Thomas has been overwhelmed by the response to The Teacher’s Pet, both in Australia and all over the world. Asked why he thinks it has touched so many people, he says: ‘I think it’s the grief strangers feel for Lyn’s daughters being told their mother was alive but had decided to start a new life that didn’t include them. It doesn’t get much more evil than that.’
The Teacher’s Pet follows other true crime podcasts, including Undisclosed and Serial, which have proved that the medium can yield real results. (Serial led to the overturning of chief protagonist Adnan Syed’s conviction.) Detectives are now refocusing their energies on Lyn’s disappearance and Thomas is optimistic about a positive outcome. ‘Hopefully the evidence we’ve uncovered and public pressure we’ve created will force the DPP to look at this,’ he says. ‘From an evidentiary perspective, Chris Dawson should be charged.’